Archive for the ‘Comics’ Category

This is an unfinished comic. It was going to be your basic pirates in jail telling stories kind of thing, starting with Henry Morgan’s famous Panama expedition, and moving on to other more fictional exploits. Unfortunately I discovered that my dialogue skills, ahem, need work, so I never got beyond the first couple of pages. Mostly I just wanted to draw maps, and I really enjoyed the research. The first panel is meant to evoke the approach views that you can see in William Dampier’s books written in the 1690s. (Dampier was a pirate, navigator, scientist, and late 17th century Rick Steves who is well worth learning about.)

The idea behind this comic was to do a dialogue-free action sequence that might be a fragment from a larger story. The car is, of course, an AMC Gremlin X model. Did you know that some Gremlins had v8 engines? I don’t remember if I actually did the calculations to see how far the car would travel after it went off the edge, but I should have.

Who has time for a 24 hour comic, really? It takes all day, and the results aren’t usually awesome. Not long after I did my 240hour comic, I started doing 1-hour comics… the idea is the same, but the time commitment is less. This is the first one I drew.

This comic is one of the few I’ve ever done that I felt the side scrolling format really worked for. Eventually I turned it into a minicomic (but not a scroll, alas), and I also etched it onto an 8 foot wide brass panel.

Some friends of mine own Film is Truth video in Bellingham, Washington. I think it might be a non-profit now? Anyway, back when there were millions of video stores they had me make a short series of comics to advertise their store. It was probably the 90s.

What strikes me is how astonishingly bad my lettering is. I’ve always had terrible handwriting. It’s still pretty bad, but a few years after these comics were drawn I forced myself to learn italic handwriting. Now I can, at least, make something that looks halfway pretty if I try. (It only takes a week or two, and I’d recommend learning it to anyone who somehow makes it to adulthood with illegible chicken scratches.)